Mandarin-Gold (31 page)

'I was,' agreed Gunn, 'but what more can we do with only one ship? Jardine was right. They are too powerful for any opposition. If we'd started a few years ago, when they were smaller, we would have had a chance.'

'Maybe we could negotiate a sub-contract from them?' suggested Mackereth hopefully, seeing his fees vanish like mist on a morning horizon.

'I am not going back begging for favours, with my tail between my legs. I'll try elsewhere.'

'There
is
nowhere else,' said MacPherson. ‘The market's on this coast only.'

The mandarin began to speak. Mackereth translated.

'He asks if you know the Hoppo in Canton?'

'No,' said Gunn shortly. Then he remembered, when he had first landed from the
Trelawney,
the fat man in the sedan looking at him intently as though he wanted to remember his face.

This affliction, whether in a mild form, as in MacPherson's case, or in one of its more serious variations, was as common among the Chinese as cold or croup in England, and just as little regarded. Fathers, mothers, children were infected, then infected others, only to be reinfected themselves.

'Tell him I will treat him, then,' said Gunn resignedly. After all, the man had bought a hundred chests. More conversation; heads nodding, shoulders jogging up and down.

More shouting; the mandarin clapped his hands. A young man with jet black beard climbed up the gangway, and bowed low to Gunn.

'I'll examine him in my cabin,' said Gunn, and turned to Mackereth. 'You come, too, to interpret.'

After the open deck, the cabin felt hot and stuffy. The sun, reflected off the tossing water like heat from a burnished metal mirror, was burning into the wood walls.

'Tell him to undress,' said Gunn.

The young man slipped off his clothes and stood, naked. Gunn saw the wet scabs across his chest, the cicatrices on his neck. The skin under his beard was pocked with ulcers, encrusted by a concretion of yellowish discharge that oozed from scabs the size of sixpences.

He examined the groin; the mandarin's son winced as Gunn touched his flesh; it felt dry and hot and scaly, and his pulse was a hundred and three. His back was covered with a minute eruption, as though he had been sprayed with grains of red sand; all the signs of a textbook case of syphilis.

"Tell him to rub this into these spots and ulcers three times every day and night. I will also give him some Peruvian bark to chew and sarsaparilla essence for him to drink every hour. Explain that this mercury will give him even worse pimples, and more pain. His skin may turn green and his mouth grow so painful he can barely swallow. But that is the strength of the cure fighting the disease. He may also need to be bled to relieve the pressure of blood in his body.'

Mackereth translated; the young man spoke; Mackereth translated again.

'He asks how you will treat him if you do not come here again — if you stop trading?'

The cabin door opened before Gunn could reply. The mandarin came in and closed it quietly behind him. He said something to Mackereth.

'His Excellency says he also wishes you to treat his son on your return.'

'Perhaps he could come to Macao?'

Gunn supposed he would be there, at least until he decided what to do, whether to take passage again as a ship's doctor, or to try some other branch of trade.

The mandarin spoke again.

'He could not travel to Macao for some months, as he has only recently, taken up this appointment. But if you help his son, he could help you.'

'How?'

'He says he owns the controlling shares with the Hoppo, and under a nominee's name, in Rona
^:
Lloyd.'

'Who are they?'

'Traders. They own five ships. Mostly old country wallahs, but useful for all that. Lloyd died a few months ago, and Rona is going back to Scotland. He has made his money. He does not wish to fight Jardine and Matheson and all the others. He wishes to retire.'

The mandarin was also smiling. Maybe he realized the precariousness of Gunn's position? Maybe he wanted Jardine and Matheson to have more competition, because then there would be no monopoly in mud, and he would be able to play the companies against each other?

'No. I do not wish to pursue this conversation. Fifty-fifty or nothing. And tell him that the nothing means no treatment for his son. Tell him absolute last price. No more speakee. Ever.'

'He says, yes.'

'Why did he give in so quickly?' asked Gunn; he had expected a tussle to continue for an hour or more.

'He says that he wants his son cured. He is his only son. Also, seventy better than sixty, sixty better than fifty, but fifty better than none.'

'True,' said Gunn. It was. true for him, too. The mandarin had no idea how near he had been to ruin. Or maybe he had guessed? Gunn felt his back clammy with sweat at the thought of the prospect that would have faced him without money to pay off his crew.

'Yes,' said the mandarin in pidgin. 'All clean equal split down middle. Me velly happy. May wealth flow in abundantly.'

They shook hands.

'Hear, hear,' said Gunn, beginning to rub the mercury ointment into the young man's skin. 'And tell him it is a condition, of our deal that he takes the rest of my stock at middle price. Seven dollars a chest.'

'Because his son has been too often a very hard man, he is in the position you see him now,' said Gunn. 'Tell him he'd better abstain.'

And then he thought of Ling Fai, and her body against his; who was he to advocate morality now?

'Tell him nothing,' he said, grinning. 'Except we have a deal.'

14

In Which There Is a Famous Victory

As the bows of the
Hesperides
carved a sharp white arrowhead of foam through the dark and glittering sea, the moon painted a silver path from the upper deck to the distant, shaded shore.

Ling Fai leaned, on the rail and smelled salt spray, and felt the deck creak and move like a living thing under her bare feet. She had never been so far out to
^-
sea before. The immensity of the empty ocean, and the comforting size of the masts and their spread of sails against the blue vaulted dome of the sky were curiously peaceful. She might be the last person left alive in all the world.

She thought of MacPherson; his whisky breath, his unshaven cheeks, the matted hair on his chest, his kindness to her. Then she thought of Gunn: tall, narrow-hipped, hard in brain and body as the brass rivets in the rail on which she leaned. She liked them both, in different ways: she needed them both in different ways.

She had never met men like them before. They were so unlike the Chinese men in her family; her old father and her two brothers, with their quiet unquestioning acceptance of whatever the gods might have in mind for them. They asked so little of life; a bowl of rice, some plantains, strips of boiled fish and dried lychees once a day; and at night a shelter against the dews of darkness. She would never be content to return to that ordered, humble existence now, and yet what else could the future hold for her?

She had heard that England was an island on the other side of the world where nights were never as warm as this, where even the sea was cold and the sun was pale. The air was often milky with mist and smoke, and people crowded together in brick and stone building, in towns far larger than anything she could imagine. She had no place there.

MacPherson and Gunn had slid into her life, her sheltered existence, as they had slid into her body. They had changed her attitude towards inevitability: you did not need to accept without question whatever the gods decided you should have. You could mould your own life as the potter moulded clay. You held the key to many decisive things in your own mind; .your actions could guide your destiny.

These things she had learned by watching them, listening to them, lying with them. And one day they would leave, and then she would be alone, because no Chinese man would take as his wife a woman who had been fondled and stroked by a Barbarian.

She had had no idea that these men would enter her life, and equally she had no inkling when they would leave. But it was certain as a sail must fill with wind that one day they would go. Other, younger women — perhaps Chinese, perhaps from their own country — would claim them and she would belong to the past. Then her memory and her influence would dwindle as the coast dwindled behind a ship; she would become only a face, then nothing but a name, half-remembered, half-forgotten.

But she would always remember them, both of them, as they were now: the quirks of their speech, the scent of their skin, the feel of their bodies in hers. And in the years to come, when she was awake, as now, when all the rest of the world seemed asleep, and only the stars kept watch with her, then she would wonder where they were; and whether they loved anyone, and, much more important, whether other women loved them.

It was true what Gunn had said about the Sixth Happiness. That was the greatest, the most important of them all. Which, no doubt, explained why so few people ever knew it existed, let alone dwelt in the wonder of ,its warmth.

Commissioner Lin was feeling unusually happy; in one day, he had received two communications from his Emperor, the Son of Heaven.

The first was what he had so fervently hoped to receive, a strip of dried roebuck flesh, which meant Promotion Assured. The generosity of this communication so overwhelmed Lin that he respectfully lit a stick of incense and
kowtowed
nine times in the direction of the Royal palace at Peking. Then he rose ceremoniously from the floor and opened the second scroll.

Although this had been sent some weeks after the first, it had been delayed by floods and lame horses. It contained permission for his request that he should reward everyone who had surrendered opium with five catties of tea — about six and a half pounds, as the Barbarians measured weight — and a reply to his question about disposing of the surrendered opium.

He had proposed sending it to Peking so that none could doubt that it had been destroyed and not stored secretly for him to resell at some later date. Colleagues at Canton had pointed out that if he sent opium worth a fortune in silver to Peking on a journey that would take months, very little would actually reach the capital. Then those who envied Lin's promotion would say he had not despatched the right amount.

The Emperor, while not admitting to such failings in the characters of his officials, now told him to destroy it near Canton.

So Lin called in his secretary and issued instructions for the Barbarian Elliot to transport the opium to Chuenpee, a town on the coast near Whampoa. He then gave instructions for a wooden pavilion to be built immediately at Chuenpee so that all interested people could join him in witnessing the final destruction of this foreign, poisonous mud that had so dangerously weakened the physical calibre of his countrymen and also the currency of the whole country.

The messenger pulled a third-scroll from the leg of his right boot. This was written by a Censor, one of the Emperor's personal; advisors. Why, asked this writer, when Lin had been sent to Canton specifically to stamp out the importation of opium
for ever,
had he not produced a permanent plan for doing this?

True, Lin claimed he had confiscated some opium, and presumably he had extracted a guarantee from the Barbarian traders that they would not transport opium in future.